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Flannery O’Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia, attended the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop before going to New York.  She did not stay long, as her health began failing her at a young age.  She suffered from Lupus and in 1955 moved back to Georgia to be under the care of her family.  She died August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.

O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic, yet the characters she portrayed in her work were Protestant. It was her observation that Protestants expressed their faith through dramatic action, something she did not see in Catholics. This fit with her philosophy on writing about religious matters, in that she preferred to approach her subjects indirectly, that is, through the depiction of human actions.

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O’Connor’s work is evidence to a deeper understanding of the role religion plays in the South.  Critics often refer to her work as grotesque, as she focused her tales on the darkness of human nature. To this label she responded: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

See our book review of O’Connor’s
A Good Man is Hard to Find

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